


Not Quite Shared Trauma

by Duganator01



Series: Out Of Time [2]
Category: RWBY
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fall of Beacon (RWBY), Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Jaune Arc Is A Good Bro, Nightmares, Time Travel, Time Travel Fix-It, Volume 7 (RWBY)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-29
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:02:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24434014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Duganator01/pseuds/Duganator01
Summary: One lone version of Oscar remembers his entire team being slaughtered in front of his eyes. The price for fixing it, was being the only person with memories of that timeline. He’s not handling it well.Every version of Jaune remembers the Fall, the despair that followed after, and the long painful journey it took to recover from that. He’s handling it slightly better. Slightly.
Relationships: Jaune Arc & Oscar Pine, Jaune Arc & Oscar Pine & Lie Ren & Nora Valkyrie, Jaune Arc/Pyrrha Nikos
Series: Out Of Time [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1764574
Comments: 3
Kudos: 41





	1. To Hold You Under

**Author's Note:**

> Maple leaves, once a sign of fall coming, and all the festivals and family gathering that came with it. Now they are just dead, and empty. Red, but not as red as they used to be.

The sky was dark. Clouds hung low in the sky as Jaune ran through the wasteland. Where he was running to or what he was running from, he had no idea. Whatever it was had set his heart racing. The amount of fear in his veins was only beaten by when Pyr- when Beacon fell.

So yeah. He was running.

Shadows of figures he should know drifted just out of sight, obscured by the clouds of smoke that seemed to fill this place. Every so often he caught whispers from voices he thought he recognized, only for there to be nobody there when he approached. The ground was rough and featureless, and he kicked up more clouds with each step he took.

He didn’t know where he was, or even how he’d gotten there. 

Jaune remembered walking with Ren and Nora and Ruby through the woods, but they didn’t seem to be anywhere around now. Pyrrha wasn’t there, she would never be there again. The pain of her absence seemed to echo through the emptiness of this land, multiplying and compounding the aching emptiness in his chest.

As he ran, the soles of his boots scuffed over the uneven ground. The ground caught at his feet with unseen cracks and pitfalls and threatened to send Jaune tumbling to the ground. But he couldn’t stop, couldn’t fall. Falling meant pain, that he was sure of The thing he was running from would catch up, and the cloying clouds of ash would bury him, and then the pain would come.

Pain from what, now that he couldn’t say. But Jaune was certain he’d felt this pain before, and that he’d give anything to never feel it again.

He found himself in a lane leading to a looming shape at the end. The path was paved with cobblestones, lined with the bare skeletons of leafless trees. The bleached white trunks were backed by a wall of smoke so thick he could cut it with a knife. The flaming red leaves lay in heaps around the bases of the trees, providing the only colour in a world that seemed to be forged from ash

Just red, standing out in a field of grey. The leaves looked freshly fallen, like autumn had come and gone in an instant.

Red eyes were watching him from the smog beyond the trees. The snarling that accompanied the eyes was joined by an increase in the whispered voices. Pain tinged their words now. Jaune’s hand fell to the hilt of his sword, preparing to run in to the aid of those there.

His hand closed on air.

Jaune’s eyes dropped away from the wall of smog to look down to where his sword should be, where it  _ had _ to be, but there was nothing there. Wisps of grey smoke curled through his fingers to join the clouds that drifted around him. He stumbled backwards a few steps, watching with horror as his chest plate melted away as well, leaving him defenseless and completely useless to help the hurting people in the smoke.

The pain in the voices was increasing, and he found that he could pick out and recognize a few of them: Neptune, Sun, Blake, Yang WeissRu _ byNoraRenOscar- _ All his friends, getting hurt somewhere out of sight and he couldn’t help them at all.

As he backed away with stumbling steps, fear induced nausea rising in his chest, the backs of his legs collided with something. Jaune’s heart hammered when he whirled around, certain that it was going to be a Grimm. Wondering whether he’d be able to fight back, or even if he wanted to. But there was no monster there, only a statue.

A statue that he recognized, having passed it every day for months on end. A statue of two golden warriors with their weapons held aloft, standing on the body of a defeated Grimm.

Statue dude still had his Crocea Mors, which didn’t seem very fair. But oh well.

Jaune knew where he was. This pathway lined with trees, this statue, even the building slowly manifesting itself from the clouds in the distance. This was Beacon Academy, but he hadn’t been here since...since the Fall. He gazed around with wide eyes as he meandered towards the building itself, his mind conjuring up images of what it had looked like when he’d last been here.

Bodies of civilians, Hunters, Grimm, robots, and everything in between torn apart and scattered in the courtyard. Fire from crashed airships, ash falling like snow from the sky above, the smell of smoke and blood overwhelming his senses, and the cracks of gunfire from every direction. 

Screams, not unlike the ones that echoed from the shadows around him now. That giant Grimm circling the tower, the overwhelming realization that they were outmatched and there was nothing they would be able to do, flashes of fire and explosions from Ozpin’s office.

One final light glowing as bright as a bonfire at the summit of the tower and dissipating into the wind.

Jaune noticed in a daze that he’d reached the foot of the tower. He hadn’t stood here since...in this exact  _ spot _ since… His hand closed on the tattered remains of a red sash tied around his waist, fingers rubbing absentmindedly into the soft fabric. If he’d just been faster, if he’d just been able to convince her, if he’d gotten help to her in time, if he’d just been  _ better _ -

_ “You shouldn't have let me go…” _ A voice whispered from the darkness and the smoke behind him. Jaune’s eyes widened and he dropped the sash in shock. He knew that voice, would  _ never _ forget that voice. But that was impossible. He couldn’t be hearing her, she was...she was…

He turned and the clouds seemed to shift and swirl, letting a figure both pass between and somehow manifest from them. It was her, it was Pyrrha, there was no doubt about that, and his eyes lit up in spite of himself at the sight of her.

She’d always had the unique ability to lift his spirits no matter the situation, and this moment was no exception. Smoke was filling the air, he was back where he’d lost everything, but Pyrrha was here. She wasn’t dead, she was here, and her green eyes were just as bright and beautiful as ever. The corners of his mouth quirked up into something approaching a smile, and he slumped a little in relief, but… something was wrong.

Something was terribly wrong.


	2. Rude Awakening

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A man out of time. Being alone with your thoughts is dangerous enough, especially when you’re the only person to remember the event they came from.

He was frozen.

Blood, hot and viscous trickled thickly across the cracked concrete beneath his feet.

And he was frozen.

Sharp orange hair, dark hair with a pink streak, silvery white the color of snow, bouncy orange crackling with energy. All fanning out from their bodies, soaking red. The wrong color, the  _ wrong _ color.

And he was frozen.

They were all dead. His friends, his teammates, his  _ family _ . All dead on the ground. And he couldn’t stop it, there was no way to stop it, he should have been able to  _ fix this _ -

He was frozen. 

His breath wasn’t coming into his lungs. He couldn’t breath. He couldn’t inhale. He tried, only once, but he could taste the copper in the air, taste the salt of the tears streaming like a river down his cheeks.

He was frozen, but he needed to breath, this couldn’t be  _ happening _ -

And he woke up.

Oscar Pine sat bolt upright in his bed. His lungs heaving for oxygen the nightmare hadn’t granted him.

Rolling over, he tumbled less than gracefully from the top bunk into the patch of moonlight spilling across the floor. Still night time. Was it night time before? He didn’t know if it was.

Time was becoming a problem, and the nightmares weren’t helping.

He scrambled to his feet, as well as he could, and his bare feet stung against the cold ground as he stumbled still half-asleep over to the bunk beside his. 

He had to be sure, had to check. They were alright, they had to be. It had just been a dream, a memory more accurately, but he had to be sure...

Dark hair with a pink streak fanned across a pure white pillow. Dark with pink, not stained with red. Ren’s chest rose and fell beneath the covers with the deep breaths of sleep.

Oscar stood on his tip-toes to peek over the lip of the top bunk. Spiky orange hair went every which way. Soft and fluffy, and not soaked and stuck together with her own blood. Just as messy and unruly as it was when Nora was awake. 

The boy sighed with no little bit of relief and settled back to the ground.

He glanced at the clock and groaned. Three in the morning. No better than last night.

No more sleep would be had tonight, no matter how hard he tried. And he didn’t really want to try, not again.

Windowsill it was.

Where he could sit and watch the constant bustle of Atlas, even at the dead of night. And where he could be sure to keep his family in full view, just in case his mind decided to keep playing tricks on him.

A yawn stretched his jaw wide, and he rubbed his eyes as he shuffled back to his bunk. He wanted so badly to reach up and tug the stiff blanket from the mattress, knowing too well how cold that windowsill got from previous nights, but that would put him at risk from falling asleep again. And he couldn’t have that.

So extremely reluctantly, he went on by, failing to resist the urge to gaze longingly at his stiff and scratchy, but warm, bed. 

Oscar clambered up onto the windowsill, careful not to knock the softly glowing Relic from its perch there. No need to wake anybody else up, it was bad enough with him getting no sleep.

Not that it seemed to be entirely restful, he thought, hearing Jaune mumbling to himself from the bunk below Oscar’s. The knight’s brow was furrowed, even in sleep, and he was clutching the covers tight to himself as if he was trying to keep them from running away.

Guess Oscar wasn’t the only one being plagued by nightmares.

The boy pulled his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them, watching Jaune’s restless sleep and wondering if he should do something about it. 

He knew that he himself would be extremely grateful to anyone for pulling him out of the nightmares he’d been having. But who knew how Jaune would react? Oscar had seen Ren try to wake Nora up before, and she’d nearly taken his face off. And that had just been normal waking up.

If Jaune lashed out, he could easily take Oscar’s face off without realizing what he was doing. 

And gods knew what Jaune was even dreaming about. It wasn’t pleasant for certain. Oscar could tell that just by looking at him. But what old demon from the past was being dredged up by his subconscious, Oscar couldn’t even begin to guess.

Personally, his nightmares aren't even from an event that long ago. Maybe that was why they were still so vivid. Watching half your team die and then being extremely personally, if tangentially, responsible for the death of the third… well it wasn’t pleasant to say the least.

Oscar sometimes wondered if that Jaune  _ did _ die when he gave Oscar all his Aura, or if he was left alive. Alive and alone, the lone survivor of that doomed version of team JNPR.

He didn’t know which outcome was worse.

Shivering from the chill of the window, and from the thought, Oscar turned away from the room and gazed out at the sleeping city below.


	3. Coming Up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> But before they died, the leaves were trees to hang his hope. And since the leaves were gone, and maybe Oscar had never had them, Jaune would have to do.

She was Pyrrha, there was no doubt, but… There was no way she could be Pyrrha. 

She looked _wrong_. Wrong in a way that sent chills up his spine. Close to the original, but not quite correct. Like nails on a chalkboard.

Her skin was dulled, nearly colorless, pale from blood loss or something worse. Her hair seemed somehow desaturated, and it drifted behind her in a wind that he could not feel. 

One of her hands was stretched towards him, but it was shaking and held none of the sureness and confidence that he associated with her. The clouds were cloaking her, clinging to her skin and her clothing like they wanted nothing more than to drag her back into the murk. 

And her face… Pyrrha’s face was displaying an emotion that Jaune couldn’t quite identify. If it was an emotion, it was a totally emotionless one. 

It was betrayal, incredible betrayal. It was cold, not like ice is cold, but like fire felt cold when you got burned. It was personal, not as a fist to the face is personal, but how knowing that someone’s favorite color is yellow but not _that_ yellow was personal. And it was pain. Again, not like a bullet or a knife was pain, but like being told that they weren’t mad they were just disappointed.

And her eyes. They were bright and exactly how he remembered them, that was true, but there was a fractured sort of light in them. Like someone had gone inside and broken something deep inside her, something that couldn’t be fixed.

It was a betrayed, cold, personal, painful kind of expression on Pyrrha’s face. Jaune had seen the demo version of this expression before when the whole Cardin thing happened, but it was infinitely worse not that he’d really done something to deserve it and worse from his partner.

 _“You killed me, Jaune,”_ Pyrrha said in that same whispery tony. Her mouth barely moved, and her voice held none of the warmth it did before. His heart stopped beating in his chest. 

The fog seemed to swirl in the same wind that had caught Pyrrha’s hair. For a moment everything was silent, which was strange because if he could Jaune was sure he’d be screaming, but his voice seemed to have abandoned him momentarily.

She stumbled towards him, and her hand lowered slightly. Her green eyes turned dark as a different type of pain filled her expression. The type of pain that he had come to associate with Glynda’s chiding words and his Aura dropping into the red. “No. No no you _can’t-”_ he murmured in alarm.

Red light, like sunlight passing through water, flickered over her body and died. Her legs gave out beneath her, and she fell bonelessly to the cobblestones before the doorway of Beacon Tower.

Jaune dove for her, reduced to muttering increasingly frantic denials under his breath. “No no no _no no nonono no NO NO!!_ ” He gathered her into his arms, determined to keep her with him this time, if he just held on tight enough then she wouldn’t… she couldn’t not _again_ …

Pyrrha, I’m so sorry, he found himself sobbing as he buried his head into her shoulder. Jaune’s arms were wrapped tight around her body, but hers only hung limply by her sides. “It’s all my fault.” His heart was hammering fit to beat out of his chest, but he could feel no beat from hers.

Pyrrha’s body began to dissolve under his hands, to flake off and float away in pieces of bright amber. Sparks and embers that used to be Pyrrha drifted away from him no matter how tightly and desperately he tried to hold her there. Tried to keep her from drifting away.

His cries became more distraught, begging and pleading with her, with the gods, with the world. Anything to keep her there with him, to keep him from failing her again. But it was no use, she was gone, and he was left in the smoke filled courtyard with only the memory of holding her in his arms.

And then that, too, was gone.

With one sobbing gasp, Jaune’s eyes flew open.

He jerked up from where he’d been lying, hand flying to his mouth to stifle any sound he might make. Something that was a cross between a scream and a whimper got caught in his throat. Pyrrha’s name had gotten lost somewhere on its way to his mouth.

Jaune’s heart was pounding, his breath was coming in little wheezing gasps, and his cheeks were wet with tears he didn’t remember crying.

He gulped in lungfuls of air in an attempt to slow the frantic beating of his heart. Once he’d calmed down enough to look around, he took in his surroundings. The dream was clinging stubbornly to the back of his mind, and Jaune needed to confirm he wasn’t there anymore.

It was the middle of the night. Stars were blinking lazily outside. He was sitting up in his bed in Atlas Academy, the blankets spooling around his waist. 

Tumbling out of his bed, his heart still hammering in his chest, he breathed a sigh of relief when he found Nora snoring restfully in her bunk, Magnhild hanging from a hook on the wall at the foot of her bed. 

At the sight of her weapon, he jolted and went scrabbling in the dark next to it for his sword, almost afraid that he wouldn’t find it there.

It was there, thank the freaking gods. One glance across the room later confirmed that his armor was similarly present, and not, as it had done before, evaporating into strands of smoke.

Ren was lying in his covers on the bunk under Nora’s and Jaune had to duck his head to see him properly. His teammate’s chest was rising and falling with the deep and even breaths of sleep. 

Oscar wasn’t sleeping, as had happened more and more often since he’d… come back. Nightmares must be messing with him as well, and Jaune wished there was something he could do to help. 

The boy was watching him with wide eyes, reflecting the starlight outside, and Jaune knew there was no disguising why he’d woken up. Oscar had seen the whole thing from his spot on the window sill. Jaune slumped back into his bunk, yawning and rubbing hard at the sleep in his eyes.

They were all there, at least. Peaceful sleep or troubled sleep aside, they were all there. Safe, alive, not being hurt somewhere out of sight where he couldn’t get to them or help them. He hadn’t failed his friends yet, not like he’d failed her. 

Speaking of…

Jaune’s eyes softened and fell to the bedless spot next to him where for months he’d woken to seen Pyrrha in the other bed next to him.

A flash of light from a passing airship reminded his sleep-deprived mind of embers and sparks, of falling apart and drifting away, of loss. And Jaune’s heart clenched painfully in his chest. That nightmare was a new one, but he’d been having similar ones for long enough now that the concept was familiar. He’d been too late again, hadn’t been there in time again, hadn’t been able to stop her from _dying_ again.

He lifted his head from his hands, and gazed blearily over at Oscar. The kid was so much younger than all of them, and he’d already had to deal with so much smushed up into such a short amount of time.

Ozpin, the Relics, the Maidens, Ozpin _again_ , Ironwood, and now this whole business with the time travel thing.

Anyone could see that it was all weighing on him. Nobody had been able to get the whole story of the other timeline out of him yet, but they all knew it had to be something terrible.

Oscar was cracking, breaking under the weight. And Jaune knew from personal observation, and personal experience, that if Oscar was left to deal with the weight alone… well he’d shatter. And he’d never really be whole again.

Maybe the pieces wouldn’t all fit together correctly, or a few shards would be missing. Or maybe there’d just be too many for his own two hands to hold, and he’d put them all back together, but they’d cut into him and leave scars that would never really heal.

All those months ago, just after the Fall, Ruby had been struggling under the same weight that Jaune had. A slightly different weight, to be sure, but one just as heavy. Neither of them had stepped up to help the other carry the weight until it was almost too late.

Ruby cut her hands. Jaune lost a few pieces.

He wouldn’t let that happen again. Not to anyone, and certainly not to Oscar.

**Author's Note:**

> Back due to popular demand, by me if nobody else, here's more of this thing where Oscar can time travel


End file.
